Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2006-09-25/In the news
Wikipedia in the news
Acceptance of Wikipedia in academia
Wikipedia continued to get both positive and negative press coverage on its reputation as a reputable source. University of Connecticut's The Daily Student carried a story titled Wikipedia More Reliable Than Perceived saying, "The popular assumption with Wikipedia is that information in its articles has many flaws since they are not necessarily written by experts on the subject. Though many professors and educators frown upon Wikipedia in a research setting, the information presented in many articles is quite accurate and the validity of the web site should be reconsidered by the public at large."
The Des Moines Register carried an article documenting various Iowa towns and their strange claims to fame in an article titled Wikipedia chronicles lore, legend, lies. And a reporter with The Williams Lake Tribune claimed he is Addicted to Wikipedia.
However, ECT News (aka Linux Insider), in Wikipedia's Place in Academia Questionable, claimed "Research, the cornerstone of academia, has little room for the haphazard information-gathering Wikipedia offers. Wikipedia, as far as education goes, is best left to assist with the seventh-grade history assignment on John F. Kennedy, not the 300-level research paper on the French Revolution."
Media coverage of Citizendium
Citizendium, Larry Sanger's fork of Wikipedia (see last week's article) received broader coverage with The Guardian, The Sydney Morning Herald, and Information Week providing coverage. The Guardian article stated, "One of Wikipedia's founders, Larry Sanger, says he plans to rewrite it - as Citizendium, a "citizens' compendium". To succeed, he will probably need to attract many of the people who contribute, or used to contribute, to Wikipedia. But whether the "new Wikipedia" will avoid the problems of the old one, or just create new ones of its own, remains to be seen."
The San Diego Union-Tribune discussed the relationship between Wikipedia and Citizendium. The article stated that "Sanger said he was pleased that Wikipedia was accepting of his new project. 'We will take the best of their articles and edit them and hopefully make them better,' he said. 'And they are free to take from our articles. We're in a partnership to a certain extent, two parallel-thinking projects.'"
Other coverage available on WebProNews, Ars Technica, Red Herring, Slashdot, Corante, and The Register.
Wikipedia as source
- Wikipedia was used as a background source on Central Criminal Court of Iraq by Jurist, a legal news and research site maintained by the University of Pittsburgh School of Law faculty.
- The New York Times reported on a professor at Harvard Medical School who claimed he "used Google and Wikipedia, [in] about two minutes" to find the results of a clinical trial on sting victims.
Continued coverage of China's block of wikipedia.org
- OhmyNews International of Seoul, South Korea notes that "Wikipedia could be the most prominent victim of Chinese Internet censorship."
- National Review Online praised Wikipedia's stand, stating "Wikipedia has its faults, but apparently lack of guts or honor is not among them." (quoted from the Sept 11th 2006 post at HiWired blog Three Cheers for Wikipedia. )
- The Shenandoah Daily News-Record also gives "Wikipedia Applause"
Other articles
- Wikipedia Ads on AdSense? "Not Ours," they say - "It's being speculated that the ads were bought by someone who had links in the crowdsourcing entry, but since Gerard said he has removed all the links in that entry..."
- Wikipedia Selects C.U. Page As 'Featured Article' Today - "Wikipedia ... elevated the Cornell University page to “Featured Article” status today after impressing Wikipedia editors with its style, completeness and commitment to accuracy."
- Online encyclopaedia is in need of redrafting - Item in this months Health Informatics Now
Discuss this story
This should be clarified. Sanger is claiming 160 users for the mailing list, not the encyclopedia itself, which of course doesn't exist yet. The mailing list archives show about forty different contributors to the list so far. (A number of those contributors are Wikipedians.) This would suggest that the actual encyclopedia, when it gets going, will not be drawing thousands or even hundreds of contributors, at least initially.
I don't have strong feelings one way or the other about the project. As Wikipedia arbcom member Fred Bauder and others have already pointed out, any good, substantial edits that people make on Citizendium can (and probably will) be copied right back to Wikipedia. That would tend to make the project superfluous, but we'll see. Casey Abell 19:29, 21 September 2006 (UTC)[reply]
article list
Quote
Wikipedia as source
Citizendium coverage
Covered last week:
But really, this just changes the nature of the underlying problem. Even experts can be susceptible to certain amounts of bias, particularly if they've been involved in the development of their subject area, and this could simply change the participants in the fight, rather than eliminate the fight altogether. "
"In the meantime, however, organizations should consider joining the project in some kind of meaningful partnership role. And preferably soon. At the very least, this may help prevent overly negative content from being published. At best, getting onto the list of experts early should allow for more influence in the direction that relevant coverage areas take. Simply put, if the Citizendium project is going to be using professional experts, then you'll benefit if you don't allow your competitors to become the only voices."
"This momentous event has been pored over by bloggers, newspaper columnists and egghead theorists, by the ... er. Well, perhaps as many as half dozen have weighed in...
But for the record, we noticed that there had been no response from the guerrilla group at the heart of the vast bureaucracy that's Wikipedia."
“We will take the best of their articles and edit them and hopefully make them better,” he said. “And they are free to take from our articles. We're in a partnership to a certain extent, two parallel-thinking projects.
Acceptance of Wikipedia
And when it's good, it can be very, very good."
"There are, of course, caveats to this position. Wikipedia, and other quickly referenced electronic sources, need not be unduly shunned by every person claiming to be of an "educated background." Indeed, there are favorable uses for Wikipedia and the like -- uses that should stay off of one's works cited page."
Wikipedia using adsense?
China
"However, not everyone is so craven. As the British newspaper Observer reports: "The founder of Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia written by its users, has defied the Chinese government by refusing to bow to censorship of politically sensitive entries."
Reaching FA status
Benjamin Lowe '04, who worked on the Cornell article for a year, said that the article has come a long way since it was first written in September 2001. “The original article was seven sentences long, and two of the sentences were missing periods,” he said.
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